Somatic Therapy
What Is Your Body Trying to Tell You?
Something tightens across your shoulders when a particular name comes up in conversation.
Your jaw has been clenched since before you noticed anything was wrong.
Then there’s the pounding heart, the face gone hot, the ache in your pelvis that shows up on some days and not others.
None of it arrives with an explanation.
Take Back Control of What Your Body Does
Living inside a body you can’t explain is its own constant strain.
So you manage around it, sitting through the meeting with your jaw set and your face burning.
You want to understand what your body is telling you, then change what you do with that information.
That’s learnable.
Your Body Reports Before Your Head Does
We feel our emotions in the body first, whether or not we have language for them yet.
That information shows up there long before your head registers what’s happening and finds words for it.
Our bodies are the map to our brains.
Reading that map is somatic therapy: therapy that includes the body, not only the mind.
Learn the Right Questions and Begin to Listen
Nobody teaches you how to ask your body anything, and most therapy never gets around to it.
My job is to teach you what to ask, and then to stay quiet long enough for you to hear the answer.
Between sessions, two questions come with you: What do I notice happening right now, and why does that make sense?
The parts of you we work with in session announce themselves in the body first, before they say a word.
Work Three Moves, One Sensation at a Time
We take them in order.
Notice. We begin with the sensation you’re most curious about, the one you’d name first if someone asked.
Pair it. Then we connect that sensation to the experience, the thought, and the feeling that arrived with it.
Respond. Now you act on the information, because you finally know what it’s asking of you.
Change What Your Body Does Next
Understanding a sensation is the first half of this work. The second half is your body no longer needing to perform that way.
You catch the early signal now, the one that used to arrive too late to be useful.
Fight, flight, and freeze become information you can work with.
Start With One Sensation You Can’t Explain
Bring me the one you notice most, and we’ll find out together what it has been saying.
The first conversation is a free phone consultation, and it costs you nothing but the time it takes to describe what you feel and where you feel it.
We’ll talk about what’s been happening in your body and whether this is the work you want to do.
Call me today at (269) 921-6953.
It's Time to BECOME KNOWN
You already know that if you don’t unburden the harms of your past, you’ll keep running from the emotional pain of it.
The running puts more distance between you and the people you love, more distance between you and yourself, and pushes you further into the coping that breeds more shame.
In our work together, we’ll build insight into who you are. Why you function the way you do. How to change the behaviors, thoughts, and feelings that no longer feel helpful.
To yourself, and to the people you love: it’s time to BECOME KNOWN.
Something different. Something permanent. That's what this is.
Unburden the harms of your past and live a life where you truly like who you are.
Call me at (269) 921-6953. We’ll talk by phone first, at no cost, and you can decide from there.
Free 15-minute phone consultation. Online throughout Illinois, Michigan, and Indiana.